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The first Structured Democratic Dialogue conducted in a fully virtual, semi-immersive environment took place in SecondLife in April 2009.
Yiannis Laouris, who led the initiative, secured an island in SecondLife in the context of the InetRisks project. Gayle Underwood volunteered as Assistant Facilitator and created an OpenSpace wiki to host all communication and logistics. Kevin Dye assumed responsibility for helping with the SL environment because, as he argued, "any advances we choose to explore in cyberspace must be a group effort. Therefore, I believe we need to have a good alignment on where we will focus our efforts. One individual can go through a lot of development work, and no one is even ready to test it. The burden of learning a new environment is often high, and it really helps to have compatriots. If one is alone in their learning, it is easy to become discouraged. And it is also nice to see usefulness & motivation to continue the learning". [[Aleco Christakis] congratulated the initiative (calling it an exciting and exotic proposition) to build what he called a Collaboratorium on a SecondLife island.
Experimental Targets
The following aims were discussed and agreed as key objectives of the experiments
- Test how facilitation in a Second Life Demosophia / Observatorium would look like. Aleco Christakis
- Test how to organize multi-site video conferencing (combining at least four technologies: Skype, Second Life, OpenSpace wikis, Telephone) Gayle Underwood
- Test whether Webscope can be embedded on the front end or back end of the symposium Yiannis Laouris
- Test the viability of organizing a virtual SDD when the participants have never met before, and they are deprived of physical or even virtual but visual communication. Peter Jones
- Have at least two participants together per physical location for the early sessions (primarily to encourage drinking, but also it will help in the learning ramp up.) Kevin Dye